11eleven

You might find it helpful to go through books written by therapists such as The Perfectionism Workbook and The CBT Workbook for Perfectionism to understand the causes of perfectionism and the beliefs and fears behind it.

This book isn't specifically about OCD but Overcoming Unwanted Intrusive Thoughts could be helpful as well. It talks about how to observe and accept thoughts, even if they're unwanted, repetitive or disturbing, instead of trying to suppress or fight against them.

I'm someone who was affected by Mixpanel's decision to end their messaging product.

I think having the ability to message users was a huge selling point for Mixpanel. It meant that you could track user events and details with Mixpanel and use them to send behavior triggered emails, push notifications and SMS on the same platform.

From what I see, it seems the issue was, they never realized or marketed how great it was having user analytics and messaging on the same platform. Their messaging product didn't have to be the best feature wise, it solved a lot of pain points.

No need to send your user events to a separate messaging platform, you could easily track downstream actions users took after receiving or opening a message you sent with Mixpanel to get more accurate conversion data as utms can be unreliable, it had competitive pricing (multichannel messaging platforms for large audiences are very costly).

Something that I realized is, negative thoughts and emotions are normal and part of life. It's the counterproductive or hurtful behaviors we may engage in, as a reaction to the negative thoughts or emotions, that we can try to avoid.

Feeling bad about having negative thoughts or emotions and being afraid to express them, only makes it more likely we'll engage in counterproductive coping behaviors.

In contrast, most people who get in, finish college. In person education beats online education hollow.

This isn't really true.

"According to the National Center for Education Statistics, just 41% of first-time full-time college students earn a bachelor’s degree in four years, and only 59% earn a bachelor’s in six years."

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/19/just-41percent-of-college-st...

Side note: I found it quite difficult to read the article with the fast motion animated gifs.

I noticed that animated gifs are increasingly used to "spice up" content, but in reality, their motion is distracting and can make it hard to read the surrounding text. A relevant still image works fine.

I don't necessarily agree with all of this advice. Yes giving talks, having a blog, etc. help but they are a medium to long-term play and you have to wait for leads to discover you or be referred to you. You don't have much control over when this happens, which is what causes a lot of the feast and famine cycles.

I have had success just directly reaching out to companies I wanted to work with. This meant I was at least proactively putting myself in front of them, instead of hoping they find me or remember me.

Came across this comment from another thread [1] that breaks it down a bit:

1. Go to https://trends.builtwith.com/framework to find websites that use the tech stack you specialize in.

2. Focus on smaller to mid-size companies (large corporations likely have the tech team and contractors to cover almost of their needs)

3. (Optional) Search for each company on Linkedin and add managers with relevant roles (VIP of sales, project manager, marketing manager, etc.). The goal is to familiarize them with your name so they're more likely to open your email (step 5).

4. Find the email format of these companies with https://hunter.io/.

5. Reach out to the most senior person with a relevant role at each company with a personalized 1-on-1 email.

The key here is to review their website and business and share 2-3 ideas of what you can them build or fix (if there are any glaring issues or vulnerabilities). They may not necessarily use your ideas but the goal is stand out and help them understand how they can put your programming skills to use. Here's a template you can reference: https://artofemails.com/new-clients#developer

There are a lot of businesses out there whose teams don't have the capacity to build everything so they would be keen to have a reliable freelance programmer help them bring some features or projects out of backlog.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20971098

Interesting concept! This could also be cool for missed connections.

In lieu of the missed connection's email address, you could provide a few specific details about the encounter (choosing from prewritten options):

Time (options provided in 3-hour blocks ie 9am-12pm), name of neighborhood, city, your ethnicity (or some other easy personally identifying feature).

If the other person also goes on the site to submit a missed connection within a few days of yours and fills out the same details, they'll be prompted to answer the detail about your personally identifying feature to receive your message and relay email to respond to.

(Yes this would only work well if the website became widely known as the place to go to for private missed connections.)

Probably a few loopholes with this, just thinking out loud.

One of the hallmarks of recent Reddit growth has been its mobile redesign. It aggressively nudges you to download their mobile app and it takes a few seconds longer to open any page (used to be instant with the old design). I presume they're doing this because their app has better user tracking (hard to disable tracking inside an app) and far less people are using ad blockers that work for apps too.

Interesting fact about this case:

At first, the police made statements that there was no signs of forced entry and they were not seeking suspects. This led numerous media outlets to report it was a murder-suicide. After the family conducted a parallel private investigation which discovered contrary evidence, the police finally ruled it a double homicide.

https://www.cp24.com/news/sherman-family-s-lawyer-offers-10m...

I feel what's also missing is how he acquired his very first 100 paid customers because a lot of the other strategies don't really apply (make existing users happy, user forum, roadmaps) if you don't have a minimum user base to work with.

Oh definitely, and the business sense can be boiled down to prospecting and sales. Something I've tried that does work, if you provide a lot of value upfront, is proactively reaching out to people who can offer long-term projects.

So for example, let's say you're a web developer reaching out to owner of an ecommerce store. "Value upfront" could be giving them ideas of how they can capture and recover more purchases: cart abandonment, loyalty points, etc. so they want to hire you to build it for them.

Some good templates I came across for this sort of outreach: https://artofemails.com/sales-freelancer

Also useful, how to go from hour based pricing to value based pricing: https://www.freshbooks.com/assets/other/Breaking-the-Time-Ba...

I feel one of the aspects of this that's not covered is:

Yes while the employer may not be able to legally force you to handle emails outside of official work hours and doing so counts as working...

Depending on your job, if you don't check and reply to some time sensitive emails outside of work hours, you might a) become a roadblock on someone else's project that's due soon b) be late to respond to "emergencies" and this can affect how people perceive your overall effectiveness and performance.

Of course, company culture can minimize last minute requests, unrealistic deadlines, etc. to minimize these "emergencies" that need quick replies but many don't.

It seems a lot of these tech companies' competitive edge is to ignore regulations and rules (other examples: Uber, AirBNB) to grow a massive user base 100x faster, as they hold onto the "scrappy startup" image.

Once they have achieved their scale and network effects, they can just promise changes and do an apology tour in response to any regulatory or public backlash after it happens.

Obviously this article just cherry-picked one quote from Meditations about sleep but focusing just on that...

There has been a lot of technical solutions to waking up earlier such as: smart alarm clocks, lights that mimic sunrise.

I found since nothing beats intrinsic motivation, it helps to always have a project with a defined goal you're working towards and want to achieve. This makes you driven to want to start the day.

When you don't have a project from outside forces (example: client project), you can easily turn something for yourself into a project.

Example 'project': curating playlists for different moods and activities of your life. By mentally framing and treating something as a project, making progress towards a defined goal helps you feel productive, better about yourself and gives you more willpower to start your day.

A lot of blog articles out there = fluffy content on topics tangentially related to the product or service.

Instead of blog articles per se, I'd recommend creating high value resource articles on topics people who'd benefit from your app may search for. For example, if you offer a goal progress app, people with interest may search for resources on 'long-term strategies to boost productivity that you won't give up after a few days'.

High value = it should provide a comprehensive breakdown of the topic and cover points the top ranking articles on the same topic don't. This will boost your article's search rankings and help it attract more backlinks and social shares.

You can also offer a PDF download of the resource in exchange for an email address so you can nurture these leads.

Examples of these resource articles:

[1] https://mailshake.com/masterclass/find-email-addresses/

[2] https://artofemails.com/sales-follow-up

Also important: "TunnelBear is now part of McAfee, a US based company" =

customer information can be subject to US court orders.